How this celebrity chef lost 65 pounds
Although self-taught, 28-year-old author and social media celebrity chef Joshua Weissman started cooking professionally at 19 years old. He worked at many fine-dining restaurants such as the Michelin-star Uchiko where he was the lead cook.
He started posting cooking videos on YouTube in 2014, where his channel currently has 9.63 million subscribers and a cumulative 1.8 billion views. His annual earnings from YouTube alone is $4.2 million.
Many people, like myself, discovered him during the pandemic when watching and following cooking videos was the nation’s main pastime. He is very funny and engaging. About two weeks ago, he treated his YouTube subscribers with a post on how he lost 65 pounds. He shared valuable insights in 17 minutes which he ended with three recipes.
We have gathered his top tips below with these quotable quotes:
“Balance didn’t exist for me. And how can balance, especially in your diet, exist for somebody who works with food every single day? Kind of hard, right? After many easy-to-use excuses, that’s when I realized you have to create balance. Saying never trust a skinny chef is a bullsh*t cliche´ to me. It kind of creates a reason and excuse for people to not have balance, and honestly, it’s more telling of what society thinks about balance.
“So why are we talking about this? Because I think a lot of people are struggling with this. And if I can find balance, so can you, especially when it comes to health. And I’m gonna help you with that. A lot of people asked for this video and we weren’t going to do it, but we decided, you know what, let’s just do it. I’m gonna tell you what happened.
“I’m gonna be transparent for a second. Two things. Number one, I already noticed that I wanted to trim down. I want to get shredded and I want to get to nine-percent body fat. After trimming down for about eight months, I started at 240. Now, I’m somewhere around 178, 175, and now, I’m about one to two-percent away from the body fat percentage goal that I set for myself in the beginning.
“Everything I’m about to say can be distilled down into two key points. Number one, identify whatever the goal is, commit to that. And number two — and this is the most crucial part—you just have to do the things you’re supposed to do every day to get there. That’s it. I know that that might sound a little overly simplified, and maybe you don’t have the exact answers right now of what you need to do, but that’s all you have to do. There is no secret and this applies to everything in life.”
“Now for the details of my training. Six days a week, I do a full workout, get up at like 4:30 or 5 in the morning. That’s the only way I have time to do it because it takes a long time. Just does. I do 60 to 80 minutes of weight training, depending on what weights I’m doing. I do push-pull legs three days, one rest day and then another push-pull legs, which is a different variation of the previous push-pull legs. And then I alternate that pull back and forth three days plus one rest day and then another plus two.
“Everybody’s going to need something different, right? Specific weight movements that you do are going to be different, depending on where you need to build your body. You will have to observe your body and see what you need to do. Look up a push-pull legs workout program online. There are tons of them you can start with and play with. Once I’m done for about 60 to 80 minutes, I typically do 40 minutes of cardio.
“My heart rate needs to be at 150 constantly throughout the entire workout minimum, and I’ll usually do that on the StairMaster or I’ll go do a run. This made one of the biggest differences of all time. No walking. Legit cardio. Oh, I don’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do it either. I pushed it off for a long time. Once I started doing it, I started seeing results. Don’t skip cardio. Trust me, trust me, trust me. It will be worth it. You can do it. I promise you. It’s only 40 minutes. You probably scroll TikTok for longer.”
He continues: “If you’re looking for a secret, that’s the secret. Do not skip cardio. Do not skip your workouts. Do not negotiate with yourself. Skipping the work means skipping the progress. As long as you can do that and have commitment and rigidity to the diet plan, you will see success. Failure only happens when you deviate from that, and that’s kind of like a beautiful thing if you think about it. It’s reassuring to know something will happen as long as you don’t deviate from the plan.
“Stick to the plan now, the other cornerstone, the diet. So the diet is, let’s say, 50 percent of the equation, if you will. You need to have both rigidity on the workouts as well as the diet. Everybody’s diet is going to be different. My exact daily macros currently are 2,460 calories, 320g of protein, 60g of fat, and 160g of carbohydrates. Now, for some people, that’s going to be too much. For others, it might be too little. Really depends on your body. So I’m not saying you should copy what I’m doing. I’m just saying that’s what I’m currently eating and that’s the diet.”